Move sandboxctl into cloud shell base image

[daniel-sanche]

We should consider adding sandboxctl to the official cloud shell image. This would allow users to continue communicating with their sandbox project if they lose connection to their custom cloud shell. This would also potentially allow us to completely remove the custom cloud shell image, and simplify our version deployment

[daniel-sanche]

For v.0.7.0, we should at least research how this would work

[daniel-sanche]

Cloud Shell Base Image Research

Benefits

• we can stop supporting the custom cloudshell image.
  • this has been the main cause of bugs, since we have to rebuild the image weekly for it to keep working
• simplifies release artifacts
  • currently, we have three artifacts we need to maintain and release together: a cloudshell image, microservice images, and repo code
  • If we bake the repo into the base cloudshell image, we can keep all release artifacts together in the git history.

Problems to address

• we use the base image to launch sandboxctl automatically with the open in cloudshell button. I don't think we can do that if we move to the base image
  • possible solution: use cloudshell_print to tell users how to use sandboxctl. One extra step
• end-to-end testing could be more difficult.
  • We'd have to build a new test cloudshell image with the HEAD sandboxctl version. That makes it less representative of the real environment

Dependencies

For sandboxctl to work in the cloud shell base image, we'll need also add support for our dependencies (taken from dockerfile):

• python
  • click
  • google-cloud-pubsub
  • google-cloud-monitoring
• shell
  • terraform (can we use the built-in? Or do we need custom?)
  • postgresql-client
  • jq

Open Questions

• what would our new release process look like?
• What if we need to add more dependencies in the future? Is there a process for that?
  • Idea: rather than baking all dependencies into cloud shell, we can have a dependency installation script that runs when sandboxctl is used. This give us more control over our dependencies.

[arbrown]

We have de-prioritized using the custom image moving forward.